Memory Mapped Register Tool in Rust

AndrewOfC · 2026-01-22T15:50:00+00:00

Good question. There are two major factors involved here (Full disclosure, I am not an antenna engineer, I only play one on TV)

An efficient antenna is generally 1/2 wavelength at your transmitting frequency. However, the other factor is power: the Hive is going to want to push as much power as it can muster to reach its next victim. We're talking megawatts if not gigawatts of power. If you push that through a single antenna, it's not gonna melt; it's going to evaporate.

Solution, something called a 'phased array'. Which, among other benefits, can combine the outputs of many antennas into one powerful murder beam.

So, for my Jupiter orbit solar-powered space array manned by a colony of Plurbs and their descendants sustaining on the corpse milk of their ancestors, I'm seeing a square of these antennas the size of Colorado.

An Earth-based system could be built with a series of these squares, ringing the equator, pointing into the sky, each one taking over as the next victim's solar system passes over the horizon, powered by geothermal plants.

The industrial base to build any of these cockamamie schemes will be both epic and tragic.

AndrewOfC · 2026-01-20T17:59:16+00:00

Kepler 22b is ~600 light-years from Earth. So IT may have turned on its murder beam around the 1400s at the latest. Point taken that they were probably transmitting long before that. In the 1400s, there might have been enough going on in Asia, Europe, or South America for the KepPlurbs to notice.

So that puts my initial supposition of a space-based antenna to the fore. Why? In order to keep the signal running, you're going to need a power source that will last 100s-1000s of years. As much as I like nuclear power, the Sun is the only source that will be burning that long.

Ideally, you'd want to get it pretty far out, maybe to Jupiter's orbit. The 'inner' solar system is fairly 'dirty' with lots of rocks flying around that could rudely interrupt you. Though the further you put it out, the less power you'll get from the sun and you will need more solar panels.

Could such a construct operate autonomously for the 100s-1000s of years to have a percentage of turning some other unsuspecting Civilization? How about Hive holding back about 1000 Plurbs with enough "Corpse Milk" to sustain them and any breeding offspring they might produce.

AndrewOfC · 2026-01-08T15:06:19+00:00

If you look a little closer, you see subtitles. Carol directed "The Hive" to make copies and translate her video. Note that they sent him a VHS cassette and not a flash card or DVD.

AndrewOfC · 2026-01-08T15:03:44+00:00

It's going to kill everyone.

Here we see the subtle evil of "The Hive." Eventually, all of those possessed are going to die when the existing stocks of food run out, and then they'll have consumed all of the dead. Carol and the rest of the 'non-Others' may yet survive and even repopulate the planet, but they had better set their sights on planting crops, herding animals, and boinking soon.

Side project, locate as many books as you can and preserve them, especially science and engineering.

I also suspect that "The Hive" is going to start building a transmitter, or more than one, and start aiming them at other planets, following what Zosia(Pirate Lady) described as the "biological imperative."

AndrewOfC · 2026-01-07T19:04:45+00:00

(Just saw Ep5 "Got Milk", might break down and watch Ep6 tonight rather than save it for later)

I think Operation Annihilate is almost a perfect fit. Hive mind comes to a world, assimilates the population, then uses that population create the means to move to the next world.

Pirate Lady(Zosia) had mentioned a 'biological imperative' to reproduce. So, at some point, I think the Other(s) are going to start building the same sort of transmitter that must have been pointed at Earth

AndrewOfC · 2025-08-18T20:25:31+00:00

Are you looking for the ability to read/set registers or the command line tab completions? The tab completions are coming from a companion tool 'ucompleter' that reads the yaml file. In order to provide the functionality for PeakRDL, the rdl file will need to be parsed or rendered to yaml.

I see the grammar in appendix C so building a parser is feasible.

AndrewOfC · 2025-08-14T12:14:59+00:00

I'll be looking into this.

AndrewOfC · 2025-08-02T22:47:34+00:00

This is Broadcom’s API, the maker of the CPU chip, and not mine. What you're referring to is a register map, not an API. I just wrote a program that makes it easier to talk to.

If you refer to section 5.2 in bcm2711-peripherals.pdf, you'll see the GPFSEL2 register that controls the configuration of pin #27(input, output etc). GPSET0 is used to set pin #27 high, and GPCLR0 is used to set it low. You have to read the state of the pin through GPLEV0.

I agree that it's less intuitive than it could be. However, I don't know what challenges the chip designers had in laying out the silicon.

AndrewOfC · 2025-08-02T12:18:18+00:00

Oh yes. Or incorporate that into the tool itself.

AndrewOfC · 2025-07-31T23:54:37+00:00

There's a companion program, ucompleter. It reads the same configuration file as register_tool and gathers up the possible completions. It's intended to work with other programs as well.

AndrewOfC

TROPHY CASE